Perhaps convinced that the only way to reclaim the places of bad memories is to visit them openly, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris traveled to Milwaukee on Tuesday to hold a rally at the Bucks basketball team’s court.
This is the place where the Republican National Convention was held in July; the same arena on which Donald Trump, his rival at the polls, gave a lengthy speech 33 days ago – which seems like an eternity – to accept his party’s nomination as candidate for the White House. “We have to fill this stadium,” exclaimed Chicago resident Nathalie Castillo, who attended the election, hours before it began. “We have to cleanse it of evil spirits, whatever it takes!”
It was an atypical move by Harris, who, along with her vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, called a crowd of some 15,000 people, according to data from her campaign, who practically filled all the available seats at the Fiserv Forum, while in Chicago, an hour and a half to the south, the Democratic Party was celebrating the second day of its National Convention. Leaving your own party to throw another one next door may not be the best idea a priori, but if it was about recovering Milwaukee for the Democratic imagination and, in addition, making a splash in the most populous city in Wisconsin, a state that will once again be decisive at the polls in November, Tuesday’s plan also seemed like a round move.
Those present at the Fiserv Forum tuned in via the huge screens that serve as scoreboards in the basketball court where the convention is being held to watch the delegations vote unanimously to ceremonially nominate Harris as the candidate, animated by music that underlined each one’s origins. And when she took up the microphone in Milwaukee at 8:00 p.m., the program cut to Chicago to watch her speak for two minutes via video for the first time as an official candidate to the 4,500 delegates of the convention, and with them, to the global audience that the party’s conclave draws (57 million on Monday).
Kamala Harris during her rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday. JUSTIN LANE (EFE)
Harris thanked Joe Biden for his services, as has become her custom since the president gave up seeking re-election and left her with a clear path, a path for the moment marked by the enthusiasm of voters and donors who, starting Friday, when the Chicago party is over, will enter the moment of truth: that of moving from possibilities to stubborn reality. “Don’t think that the work is done,” said the candidate, “there is a lot pending until November.”
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The vice president presented her choice as the only one capable of defending freedom in the United States, a word that was repeated over and over again on the signs that volunteers handed out to the public and in the same places throughout the stadium where dozens of photographs of Trump were reproduced at the Republican Convention in July. “I’m talking,” she clarified, “about a woman’s freedom to make decisions about her own body and not allow the government to tell her what to do,” Harris said. “By the way, I don’t know what’s wrong with these people.” [los republicanos]: they just don’t seem to trust women. But hey, we Yeah We trust them.”
Harris also defended her (somewhat populist) economic proposal, presented last week. She said she hopes to reduce the cost of groceries for Americans, rein in big pharmaceutical companies and lower the cost of housing. “This is not just about us against Trump,” she added later. “This is about two very different visions of America. One focuses on the future, the other on the past. And in Wisconsin, we fight for the future,” warned Harris, who highlighted her middle-class origins and that of her running mate (“only in America is something like this possible,” she added) and had to stop her speech when an attendee fainted. “That is the poise with which a president reacts!” shouted someone in the audience, once the shock had passed.
Walz’s speech
Walz had earlier dwelt on the idea of the future versus the past during a speech in which he once again demonstrated his natural talent for rallying the masses. “I come from Chicago,” he exclaimed, “and the atmosphere there is incredible, but there is something they don’t know: and that is that this party is much better!”
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz in Milwaukee on Tuesday. Marco Bello (REUTERS)
The vice presidential candidate recalled that a month ago, Republicans were right here “on the crest of the wave,” triumphantly listening to the speech of a politician “who presented himself as a new man” after having survived an assassination attempt just days before, but who, “in reality, spent 92 minutes ranting and raving.” “They didn’t know how much things can change in four weeks,” Walz said, before turning to attack his rival, vice presidential candidate JD Vance, with whom he has an appointment to debate on October 1.
The proof that, as Walz said, a lot has changed for the Democratic Party was there all day outside the stadium gates. Lines began to form early in the morning, and stretched back several times by 3 p.m., more than five hours before Harris took the floor. Milwaukee union leader Daniel Barfoth had arrived at 9:30, because, “for no reason,” he explained, he wanted to miss the first rally he had ever attended. Tamara Holmes, meanwhile, was coming to represent Wisconsin teachers. And Martha Donnelly didn’t know how to respond to the question of whether she would have been encouraged to come if, instead of a Harris rally, this had been a Biden rally. “He was a good man,” she said of the president, “I will never forget him calling my mother the day my father died, who was his law professor at the University of Wisconsin.” [la Universidad de] Syracuse”.
Once inside, a dj She played to liven up the wait of an audience in which women and girls predominated, singing feminist anthems of yesterday and today, from Cindy Lauper to Beyoncé. The latter’s music was played several times, but especially once, when, as is now customary, her song Freedom, Harris’ campaign anthem, served to make her leave the rally on a high note. She did so with the satisfaction of having reconquered a stage from bad memories, holding the hand of Walz, her faithful squire on the road that may make her the first woman in history to occupy the Oval Office from January.
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